... and do you want the Mass itself sung, or are you talking about an informal Mass with folk music?

I can't help you with a sung folk mass, but we have a weekly informal service (Episcopal Church-- Anglican) and the Mass itself is just a shortened form from our Book of Common Prayer.

The format (I think I have the order right):
> opening song gathering people to worship, usually upbeat
> an invocation of light (it's an evening service)
> a song introducing the Gospel reading, usually short and serious
> The reading of the Gospel lesson for the week
> the sermon
> the prayers of the people: for the church, the world, all people, and people on our prayer list
> confession
> exchanging the peace
> announcements
> an offertory song while the offering is taken and the altar prepared, usually something intensely personal and moving, beautiful
> Communion (we play an instrumental during this)
> concluding blessing
> closing song (usually a rousing stomper)


My husband is the priest, so we do the planning together. We've been doing this for about five years, every week, and now I also play for another church too small to pay an organist.

Someone has to be responsible for being the songleader. It's a very different job from performing a song. I had to learn how to do that.   (I still am.)

We started with just autoharp and songleader (me) and then added another singer and a tenor banjo player. (We didn't have anyone else available.) By now we have added a guitar and a fiddle, sometimes a 5-string banjo. We have a man who helps with the songleading now. It's not good to always have just one voice.

When we began, I told the people I had never perfomred before and God would be helping us all figure out how to do this. They like it that we do not try to be prefect. They are very curious each week, still, what new things we will be trying. When we find a song that really works, we use it again. But they will try anything we put out for them to sing.

Our music varies. We use a tiny amount of contemporary praise music, and lots of these:
> Black gospel
> Blues Gospel
> Southern (US) gospel based on gospel quartets
> Negro spirituals from slavery times
> Bluegrass Gospel
> Oldtime gospel (Carter Family and others)
> Revival Hymns
> Oldfashioned (1800's) hymns from various Protestant denominations

We have a lady who does it as a prayer service, no communion, when my husband and I are on vacation. She uses music from Taize, a capella.

To do this, I listen to all the music I can, and learn and arrange the ones I think are singable and that we can actually do with the instruments we have. This meant, at the start, buying lots of recordings and songbooks.... we presented four new songs each week, which is a lot of music to learn and lead. Now I get most of my music from online collections of rare recordings, and the Cyberhymnal. We have accumulated hundreds of good songs, making songsheets and players' arrangements as we went.

Is this helpful? Would you like a copy of our songbook? I can make you a CD with some of the recordings we listened to, for this group of about 100 songs.... we don't do them exactly the same way we heard them, so the arrangements are not an exact match, but it could help you catch the sound to make them your own. If your church can pay for the postage expenses, I can send you more, as we go. Nowadays we introduce about 4-6 new pieces each month, using our songbook the rest of the time. We also have some little leaflets, each one containing four songs, and the players' copies. Some of it is poorly xeroxed, but I am redoing all those at the moment.

Mudcatter Charcloth was asked to start a contemporary-music service at his church and I sent him all our contemporary praise music because we were not using it. He's not here at Mudcat much now, but I think I could email him if you would like to see if he could share some of that with you. In that system, the company you buy your songbooks from has recordings so you can hear the music, players' arrangments, and either printed songbooks or a CD with the text so you can make your own songsheets. Some churches use an overhead projector instead of songsheets.

~Susan